Ammonite

“Right. Modern medicine does it mechanically, like stitching, and chemically—antibiotics and things. But what about electrically? Magnetically? Electrochemically?”

“We do that already,” Sara said thoughtfully. “Strap a power pack around a break and it heals anywhere up to six times as fast.”

Marghe nodded. “According to what I’ve been reading, injury, like Letitia’s, produces a disorganization of the normal, healthy electrical pattern. Are you with me?”

“Yes.”

“Now what if, what if a person has enough control over her magnetic field, her transmissions, to affect another’s? What if the healthy person’s patterns could interact with the sick person’s?”

Hiam looked dubious.

“Sara, when Thenike ran her hands around Letitia, my body could feel it! It was like her pattern was talking to mine, to all the eddies and flows of my cells, saying: See? See how you should be? Like this, this is how you’re supposed to go.”

“But how? I don’t understand how she can do it!”

“The virus, that’s how. Oh, Sara, the things I’ve seen! When I woke up after being sick, it was like becoming conscious for the first time, Like a blind person seeing color… No, that’s not right. It was just more. Like I could see better and hear better and smell better, like my kinesthetic sense was more highly developed. There’s so much out there to notice, to feel. It’s almost as if the virus is part of this world, so that when the virus became part of me, I could see the world and feel it more clearly…”

Sara Hiam sat in obstinate silence.

“It’s the virus,” Marghe repeated more quietly. “It gets all tangled up in the DNA somehow, and changes things. Maybe it intensifies the semiconducting properties of our nervous systems. I don’t know. That’s something you’ll have to find out. Viruses are what you know. I can only tell you that it’s my belief that the virus allows us greater control—much, much greater control—over the autonomic nervous system, and other things.”

Sara was still silent. Marghe decided to change tactics.

“I’ve been thinking about Letitia Dogias. You’ve heard about her behavior during storms?”

“Yes,” Sara said unwillingly.

“Have you had the opportunity to find out why?”

“I’ve run some tests.”

“And?”

“And I can’t find anything wrong with her. Nothing.”

“I think I know what’s wrong with her: she’s very sensitive to the buildup of energy around storms, but doesn’t know what it is she feels, or how to deal with it. She’s got no biofeedback training at all. She overloads.”

“It could be a psychiatric condition.”

“It could. But it isn’t.”

The sky lit up in a long, vivid flash, then died back to inky black.

“What was that?” Sara asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

They listened, but there was no noise except the wind in the grass and, from a long way off down the valley, a trail of laughter.

“I’m afraid,” Sara said from the dark. “Everything’s so different. You’re so different. I remember you up on Estrade. You were so… ordinary.”

“I’m different, yes.”

There was no way to explain how it felt. How it was to be able to remember in a way she would have thought impossible a year ago; how it felt to only have three fingers on her left hand, to have nearly died. How it felt to have another life growing inside her, to have a partner. A home.

“Change is just change, Sara. Not all good, not all bad. Just different.” They were quiet a long time, listening to the wind in the grass.

“I’m still afraid. Soon the virus will come for me, for Nyo and Sigrid. And I can do nothing to stop it. Nothing. I’m a doctor and I can’t stop it.”

“You can’t stop the common cold, either.”

“But that won’t kill me.”

“No.”

“Hiam!” The call came clear through the dark.

Hiam started, then stood up. “Over here! Who is it?”

They heard the running footsteps, surprisingly close. “Me. Danner.”

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“Out of breath. A moment.” Danner bent over, straightened, sucked air into her lungs. Marghe could not see her face, but something was very wrong. They waited. “Sigrid just called. Estrade’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“They blew it up.”

“That flash…”

“Yes.”

“The people on board?”

“They didn’t take them off first.”

Marghe imagined a corona of plasma floating and frozen, orbiting the planet forever. “The Kurst?”

Danner seemed to notice Marghe for the first time. “Gone. Peeled out of orbit just before detonating the platform.”

“Sweet god,” Sara said.

“At least they didn’t kill us.”

“Not yet.”

Marghe stared at her. They were gone, weren’t they? “What about the gig?”

“Also gone. We’re cut off now. Completely on our own.”